Monday, November 27, 2017

Cloud, mobility and the Internet of Things have obliterated the traditional perimeter that protected organizations. The result: Higher productivity, but bigger challenges for security, data protection, and mobile device management.

This episode of the “The Endpoint Imperative” podcast series from Intel, Kevin L. Jackson and Intel’s Yasser Rasheed explore the new normal for security, with a focus on the end users.

Kevin: The topic for this episode is,"The Perimeter is Dead, Long Live the Perimeter". With me is Yasser Rasheed Director of Business Client Security with Intel. Yasser welcome back.

Yasser: Hi Kevin, happy to be back.

Kevin: This time, however, I'd like to really talk to you about this security perimeter thing. Cloud mobility and the internet things have really obliterated what I've always referred to as the wall and moat security paradigm, where working inside the enterprise was safe but working outside of the company's walls wasn't. What's pending impact of this evolution?

Yasser: You know Kevin nowadays with the cloud and mobility trends, we as end users we take our devices and work anywhere and everywhere at anytime. We take our laptops and work from home or from a coffee shop or on the go during the trip. The new shift here is really making us re-think how we protect the information that we have access to. The concept or the traditional concept of protecting at the perimeter with the traditional firewalls and gateways is really non-existent anymore. When I'm using my laptop at a coffee shop, I am no longer going through a firewall to access a cloud service. It's imperative for the industry to re-think the concept of listening at the perimeter level from a security perspective.

Kevin: Did the IT team miss the boat with getting a grip on the management of security within this new business ecosystem of today?

Yasser: From my perspective, it's not about missing the boat as much as the industry is moving and evolving very fast and IT organizations, more specifically information security organizations, need to cope with this evolution, and in certain cases may need to be ahead of it. At the same time, by the same token, that evolution is giving an advantage to the hacker community, to the bad guys really, to take advantage of the shift and attack the endpoints. Attack the end users, grab the data, steal the data or lock it in and ask for ransom.

Kevin: These new approaches to information technology have really changed the traditional workplace. Yasser how are IT leaders balancing the benefits of cloud and mobility, things like productivity and accessibility, with the obvious security challenges?

Yasser: Great question Kevin. We know that end users especially the new generations of end users focus tremendously on the ease of use and the productivity, and don't want to be burdened with additional security processes that they don't really comprehend. It's imperative for the IT leaders and information security leaders to balance end-user productivity, the simplicity of integration for IT and the productivity end-user experience for end users. The only way for the industry to evolve and achieve the right level of protection is with the right balance. This is not an easy job to do, however, it's the only way for the industry to keep moving in this direction.

Kevin: Do you have any advice on how to make security everybody's job in this new normal?

Yasser: Great question. The first thing I advise everyone is for the leaders in the IT and information security industry to educate their teams and their end users. Education is king. We need to first educate them and get them to the level of comfort with the simple attacks like phishing and how scams happen. More importantly, IT organizations and information security organizations need to focus on four priorities. The top one is identity protection. That is really protecting against identity breaches which today constitute 80% or more of the total number of breaches. The second priority is to protect the data. Data protection is really an imperative because the data is the asset that the attackers are going after. The third priority is about detecting and preventing threats, especially the new and advanced threats that we see nowadays where signature-based detection of viruses is no longer sufficient, it's necessary but insufficient. The fourth and last priority is the ability to recover quickly from an event of a breach. The breach is a matter of when it happens, not if it happens, and organizations need to be ready recover quickly to a good level of productivity. These are the four priorities that I recommend the industry to focus on, and more importantly, apply the new techniques based on hardware-based security as opposed to traditional software-based security that is no longer sufficient in this space.

Kevin: With that sound advice we've come to the end of our time for this episode. We really want to thank Yasser Rasheed with Intel for his insights and expertise.

Yasser: Thank you, Kevin, it was a pleasure to be here.

( This content is being syndicated through multiple channels. The opinions expressed are solely those of the author and do not represent the views of GovCloud Network, GovCloud Network Partners or any other corporation or organization.)

Friday, November 24, 2017

Cloud computing innovation
will power enterprise transformation in
2018. Cloud growth is also driving
a rapid rise in the storage market, exacerbating
the enterprise challenge around storage cost and complexity. The business
reason behind this marketplace reality is the proliferation of real-time data
from the web, mobile devices, social media,
sensors, log files, and transactional applications. Big Data has also found
a home on the operational side of many market verticals in applications ranging from fraud detection to the
processing of video evidence.

Originally coined to
describe datasets whose size stretched beyond the ability of traditional
databases to manage, the term’s scope has
significantly expanded to include technology
and services that capture, store, manage and analyze extensive collections of
data, to solve complex problems.Despite concerns regarding privacy and organizational
resistance, Big Data investments continue to gain momentum globally. Researchers
estimate that these investments will exceed $57 Billion in 2017 alone and are
expected to continue growing at a CAGR of 10%
over the next three years.

In the past, this type
of unexpected enterprise business investment would have led to very costly and time-consuming storage technology refresh
projects. These projects also brought with them the risk of accidentally leaving data on now obsolete
equipment, negatively impacting application availability or disrupting data backups. Luckily the maturation of cloud computing has
delivered new options to the marketplace. Public cloud services have, in fact, wholly changed how companies consume technology.
Advanced analytics, machine learning, Internet of Things, edge computing
services and new database services are making these storage modernization
decisions even more critical.

In
meeting this storage challenge,
enterprises are increasing their use of hybrid IT solution models. By shifting
investments from capital acquisition to more manageable operational
expenditures, these options combine the flexibility of public cloud storagewith security and permanence of traditional data
center storage. Forecast shows
that operational expenditures for storage services will soon start to exceed capital expenditures. For many
organizations, this path has been the key to minimizing risk, boosting
efficiencies and modernizing at the speed of business.

While these new hybrid
storage options help your IT team shift
from a reactive tactical model towards
being much more strategic business partners, the selection of the right storage
service provider is crucial. For Big Data
applications that means the consumption of cloud object storage. The elasticity
and virtually unlimited capacity of this
option make it ideal for solving corporate
big data storage challenges. While cloud
storage is seen by many as the ideal solution, cloud service responsiveness,
price and additional charges for things like API calls can make partner
selection tricky. The longer you wait to shift to cloud storage, the harder it is to keep pace with rapidly increasing storage
demands. If business success is your goal, start now to find a storage partner that
can help bridge storage gaps, boost efficiencies,
and stay ahead of your chosen market.

( This content is being syndicated through multiple channels. The opinions expressed are solely those of the author and do not represent the views of GovCloud Network, GovCloud Network Partners or any other corporation or organization.)

Tuesday, November 14, 2017

Digital Transformation is amplifying mainframe as mission critical to business growth
more than ever before. With 70% of the world’s corporate data and over half of
the world’s enterprise applications running on mainframe computers, they are at
the core of just about every transaction. A single transaction can, in fact,
drive up to 100 system interactions. The continued increase in mainframe
transaction volumes, growing on average 7-8% a year for 78% of customers, has even led to a new buzzword: The Connected Mainframe.

According to IDC’s
research, connected mainframe solutions generate almost $200 million in
additional revenue per year while simultaneously improving staff productivity
and cutting operational costs. Over 50% of the benefit value ciomes from higher transaction volumes, new
services, and business expansion. Businesses rely on mainframes to:

The growth of transaction volumes and diversity of applications
connecting into the mainframes can lead to significant operational challenges.
With more mobile to mainframe applications tio
manage and more data to transact, including eventually blockchain data,
organizations need to improve their mainframe
operations model drastically.
Reactive approaches to mainframe management just can’t keep up with the
velocity of change and dramatic growth. Enterprises are losing an average $21.8
million per year from outages and 87% of these enterprises expect this downtime
cost to increase in the future. An
astounding 66% of enterprises surveyed admit that digital transformation
initiatives are being held back by unplanned downtime.

CA
Mainframe Operational Intelligence consumes data from multiple CA solutions
and directly from the IBM® z Systems® environment through SMF records. Raw
alerts from performance, network and storage resource management tools are
automatically correlated to surface specific issues and provide predictive insights for
each issue. With machine learning and
intelligence, wide data sets lead to more accurate predictions, and better
relationship and pattern analysis. This insight also includes drill-down and
probabilities which can also trigger automated problem remediation. This
capability is uniquely embedded into the management environment to more proactively optimize mainframe performance and
availability with fewer resources.

This modern approach to operational management will help organizations
on-board new IT staff to manage the mainframe moving forward, while also protecting
limited mainframe experts to focus on essential tasks. Using machine learning
and advanced analytics, your entire team can now act
on potential issues much earlier, isolate the real root-cause faster and ultimately remediate issues before they
become revenue-impacting incidents.

( This content is being syndicated through multiple channels. The opinions expressed are solely those of the author and do not represent the views of GovCloud Network, GovCloud Network Partners or any other corporation or organization.)

Yasser Rasheed: Thank you for hosting me today. I'm very excited for this talk.

Kevin L. Jackson: It's really our pleasure. Let's get started on this. The security
world is really abuzz. We talk about GDPR or the General Data ProtectionRegulation. This is Europe's looming security regulation. Can you tell us a
little more about it?

Yasser Rasheed:
Absolutely. You know Kevin, the industry is shifting and evolving very quickly
in this space. We're excited about the positive changes taking place in the
industry. The GDPR or General Data Protection Regulation coming out of Europe
is really a replacement for the European directive that they had in the past.
It covers a whole slew of data protection and security regulations that allows
- but really caters to protecting the end user and the end user data.

Kevin L. Jackson: I understand it's really the hefty fines that have the information
security officers worried. I'm told that they can be the greater of either 20
million Euro or 4% of global annual revenues. Why is this putting the spotlight
on security and compliance in North America? I thought this is a European
thing, right?

Yasser Rasheed:
It is not a European thing only. It affects anyone that deals with the European
citizens or in business in Europe so global companies are really impacted by this
regulation and they need to pay attention to it.

Kevin L. Jackson: This is really important to you. From your point of view, at the IT
and operations level, what should these companies be really focused on?

Yasser Rasheed:
The companies need to first get educated on the new regulations. It is going
to be applicable in May or enforced starting May 2018. It is really coming very
soon. The GDPR regulation is really a legal framework that comprehends a number
of data security and privacy guidelines for organizations. For example, they
need to make sure that they look at how the data is processed, how the data is protected.
Who gets access to the data at what point in time and under what tools? Is
everything audited and logged in the right way so that they can have the right
traceability. There are a number of things that the organizations and
especially IT and chief information security officer teams need to pay
attention to in this case.

Kevin L. Jackson: With all that in mind, what should these enterprises be thinking about
when it comes to data protection at the hardware and the software level?

Yasser Rasheed:
That's a great question. First, let's head back and look at what's happening in
the industry nowadays. The whole space of cybersecurity is full with hackers
and really malicious users trying to get access to information and this is impacting
everyone. We see breaches every day. Solutions today are available in software,
however, we believe that the software alone cannot protect and cannot enforce
the level of readiness for GDPR and the likes. What we really look for is the
role of the hardware to augment and compliment the role of the software in the
space. More specifically in the security space, there are many hardware
products that companies like Intel is offering in this space to protect the
identity of the user, to protect the data of the user. These are tools that our
key organizations can take advantage of to be ready for GDPR compliance and in
general, to have a more healthy and stronger security posture in the
environment.

Kevin L. Jackson: Thank you very much for sharing that important point. Unfortunately,
though, we're at the end of our count for this episode. Many thanks to Yasser
Rasheed with Intel for his insights and expertise.

( This content is being syndicated through multiple channels. The opinions expressed are solely those of the author and do not represent the views of GovCloud Network, GovCloud Network Partners or any other corporation or organization.)

Sunday, November 5, 2017

Fast-evolving trends are changing the way IT thinks about security. To stay secure and productive, IT operations must excel at the fundamentals: PC refreshes for security, and optimizing end-user computers with Microsoft Windows 10. In “The Endpoint Imperative,” a podcast series from Intel, learn from the experts how hardware and software together make for optimized security.

In Episode 1,"IT Spending: Setting Priorities in a Volatile World," Intel’s Kaitlin Murphy talks PC refresh, security, and productivity. Here she also addresses the key trends that drive IT spending decisions. As Director of Marketing for business clients with Intel, Kaitlin leads the business client marketing organization responsible for mobile and desktop platforms, vPro, Intel Unite, and other products.]

Kevin L. Jackson: Let’s get started. Kaitlin, IT spending is up and this is being driven by cloud computing digital transformation. What could this mean to Intel?

Kaitlin Murphy:Digital transformation is really the changes associated with applying digital technology to people. In the case of my group, it's about businesses and employees, the end user, IT, facilities, and even other groups. Digital transformation touches all of the aspects of a business like, smart office or smart workspaces. How do you make your environment aware and then have it take action on your behalf?

Kevin L. Jackson: Can you give us some examples of this?

Kaitlin Murphy: Sure. This could be something as simple as air conditioning. When the room's unoccupied, the air conditioning is off, but when it sees somebody come in, it knows to adjust the temperature to their preference. It could even be something more complex like, the room knows who you are and it can contextually retrieve information based on your conversation in real time, knowing that you're allowed to access that information.

Kevin L. Jackson: That's amazing. One of the real key driving components of this spending has been the personal computer or PC sales. This is also driving the PC refresh cycle. Can you talk about those drivers and their impact on organizations?

Kaitlin Murphy: Absolutely, totally agree. PC refresh or PCs, in general, are a huge piece of digital transformation. Today, it's heavily influenced by a variety of things, one of which is security manageability. In general, a newer PC with a newer operating system is more secure and more manageable. That means less burden on IT resources, lower lifetime costs, and higher employee productivity and satisfaction. Having performane, secure, managed up to date devices is critical for a business of any size. Not only does it help with the items we talked about above but more and more that we're seeing in a company that has a digital transformation strategy is better able to attract and retain the target talent that they want. It literally affects every single aspect of a business.

Kevin L. Jackson: Let’s zoom in on security. How do you see that factoring in on the spending decisions?

Kaitlin Murphy: The corporations are a major target for bad actors. Literally, in one place you've got the crown jewels. You've got IP. You've got customer information. You've got employee information and more. Because of this, companies have to have a comprehensive security strategy in place and then the products to execute that. Part of the executing their strategy means having secure PCs. Like we mentioned before, newer PCs are typically more secure and that's for a variety of reasons. First, you've got the latest and greatest technologies and solutions and the PC ecosystem behind it. Second, with an older PC bad actor have simply had more time to find the holes and to exploit them.

Kevin L. Jackson: It really seems like you’re focusing on the PC instead of the data center. Why is that?

Kaitlin Murphy: You need to focus on both. You're right, the PC is a critical piece. One thing that not everyone knows, is that when an attack is launched on an enterprise the most common route into that company is through the endpoint. What happens is a bad actor captures the credentials of an employee and they can access their PC. When they can access the PC, they can access all the data on that PC. Typically, any place that PC is authorized to access as well. Newer PCs have solutions to help minimize this risk.

You can protect your credentials and hardware, for example, so they're harder to be spoofed or otherwise exploited. When we look at IP support desk calls, the one type of call that's grown the most in the past years' security-related incidents, like viruses or malware. These incidents place a resource burden on the company, not to mention the security risk. IT now has to make a decision. Is the cost of that older PC protecting it, securing it plus the safety risk worth more or less than just buying a new PC that has new security?

Kevin L. Jackson: Now, let’s zoom out to 18 or 24 months from now. What considerations do you see impacting IT budgets, especially, the spending on PCs and other endpoint devices?

Kaitlin Murphy: Well, while technology moves quickly, sometimes, it often moves a little bit slowly as well. I think the trends we talked about today are very firmly entrenched and the ones that we're going to continue to see in the next 18 to 24 months, security, manageability, even the value of local compute performance will all be relevant.

Kevin L. Jackson: [chuckles] Wait a minute. Why do you have to worry about local compute? Everyone's going to the cloud.

Kaitlin Murphy: Local compute's going to continue to be important. There are some things you just don't want in the cloud and some things you can do better locally, not to mention that when you have performance on the endpoint you can run some of these security solutions we've talked about today. I also think there's a trend around security innovation and that's definitely not going anywhere. Look at Off Network Solutions and Loan. The average US company has to use six different endpoint solutions just to secure a single device.

There's also a lot of trends around unified endpoint management. How can an IT organization manage its entire fleet, but usually at this point is more than one PC per person with a single set of tools? This coupled with more ambient compute devices, think of workplace transformation, devices that don't necessarily have a dedicated user, are going to increase the need for a single out of band management solution. The reason why I say out of band management is because you need to be able to manage your device regardless of OS State.

Especially as organizations become more geographically dispersed, it is increasingly important. Collectively, it seems like there's going to be a continued strain of IT resources. Budgets might be up but they aren't necessarily keeping pace with the number of new trends that IT have to track, make decisions on and execute against. This is going to pose an important question and decision for IT, on how to best allocate the resources to serve both as strategic and operational initiatives in the organization.

Kevin L. Jackson: Unfortunately, we are at the end of our time for this episode but thanks to Kaitlin Murphy with Intel, for her insights and expertise.

( This content is being syndicated through multiple channels. The opinions expressed are solely those of the author and do not represent the views of GovCloud Network, GovCloud Network Partners or any other corporation or organization.)